Intel shows off the SSD DC P4500, a 32TB 'Ruler' SSD

A year ago Intel first revealed the 'Ruler' form factor for server SSD storage. Yesterday, as part of its data-centric Innovation Summit at its headquarters in Santa Clara, CA, it revealed the a SSD DC P4500 Series Ruler drive. This SSD, about the same length and width as a 12-inch / 30cm ruler, is claimed to be the "world's densest, totally silent solid state drive". It can store up to 32TB of data, which Intel informs us is "equivalent to triple the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress".

Intel doesn't list the new 32TB Ruler on the SSD DC P4500 Series product pages as yet. If you head on over to that page you will find just 4TB and 8TB versions of the Ruler at the time of writing. The only details we have right now about the 32TB Ruler are via the Intel Newsroom.

Providing some background to the bumper 32TB new member of the SSD DC P4500 Series, Intel says it is its densest drive ever. Inside the Ruler are Intel 3D NAND chips, built using memory cells stacked 64-deep.

An important reason why companies that run/need servers will choose the new 32TB Ruler drives are that it can facilitate Petabyte of storage in a single server slot (32x 32TB Rulers in a row). Another quality of the Ruler is that compared with traditional SSD designs it "requires half the airflow to keep cool," says Intel. With data centres spending a large portion of their budgets on air conditioning, the Ruler could bring surprising savings in this area.

You can read more about the new Ruler and its design in an additional Intel blog post highlighting the work of Wayne Allen, director of data centre storage pathfinding, Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group at Intel.

Intel Xeon roadmap

Also at the Innovation Summit yesterday, Intel revealed a 'sneak peek' of its plans for Xeon processors through to 2020. TechReport shared the roadmap graphic, like the one below, and provides some details from the presentation.

In the above you can see that Cascade Lake Xeon Scalable processors will be shipping in Q4, just a few months from now. These 14nm processors will integrate a new memory controller to support Optane Persistent Memory DIMMs. Furthermore, DLBoost:VNNI will be introduced to accelerate Deep Learning. Last but not least, these will be the first Intel processors to include hardware-level mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.

Copper Lake will continue on 14nm next year and Intel highlights support for fast DLBoost: bfloat16 floating-point support, useful for AI-related workloads. At long last, sometime in 2020, Ice Lake Xeon processors will arrive, debuting on Intel's 10nm process technology.

-> Cascade Lake is a future Intel Xeon Scalable processor based on 14nm technology that will introduce Intel Optane DC persistent memory and a set of new AI features called Intel DL Boost. This embedded AI accelerator will speed deep learning inference workloads, with an expected 11 times faster image recognition than the current generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors when they launched in July 2017. Cascade Lake is targeted to begin shipping late this year.

ohmaheidReminds me of the 5ghz, 28 core processor that Intel ‘released’ a few weeks ago, that needed an industrial chiller, and custom MB to work.

If you can't win a fair fight, have an unfair one. And then attempt to adjust the rules to justify it as fair.

“My CPUs don't compete on multithreaded in the desktop space, so I'll use golden sample server chips with custom seen-nowhere alterations without any context, then suddenly run away with them when people ask questions”

“It was just a tech demo lol”

Of course in this case it seems to be that Intel SSDs compete sort-of-favourably in certain tasks but have lower capacity, AIUI. So..

“My SSDs compete poorly with better value competition in the server space, so I'll glue a bunch of them together to create something halfway abstract with big theoretical specs”